A blog devoted to astronomy / astrophysics and space missions

Moons

NASA has confirmed that it has lost contact with the Cassini space probe, which until the last moment was sending information as it descended into the atmosphere of the planet Saturn and went to its destruction. It’s the end of the Cassini-Huygens mission, a collaboration between NASA, ESA and ASI (Italian Space Agency), one of the most extraordinary space missions in history.

An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” describes a research on the presence of water on the Moon. A team led by the geochemist James M. D. Day of the University of California at San Diego examined amounts and compositions of zinc, chlorine and lead isotopes in a lunar rock concluding that water and other volatile compounds evaporated very early in the Moon’s history. This contradicts a research published only a few weeks ago in which it’s argued that ancient Moon volcanic deposits contain large amounts of water.

An article published in the journal “Science Advances” describes the detection of vinyl cyanide molecules on Titan, one of the planet Saturn’s moons. Using archive data of observation carried out with the ALMA radio telescope between February and March 2014, a team of researchers found evidence of the presence of those molecules in significant amounts. The importance of the discovery is due to the fact that it’s a substance considered to be among the best candidate for the formation of membranes and vesicles similar to those of Earth organisms’ cells.

An article sent to arXiv, the famous archive of preprint, describes the discovery of an exomoon candidate. A team of researchers led by David Kipping of Columbia University conducted a search for moons orbiting exoplanets observed by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope finding the candidate called Kepler-1625b I. Generally, research results are published on a scientific journal at the end of the work but rumors spread convincing the researchers to send an article at least to arXiv.

An article published in the journal “Nature Geoscience” describes a research that provides evidence of the existence of large amounts of water in ancient volcanic deposits on the Moon. Ralph E. Milliken and Shuai Li of Brown University used data collected by the Chandrayaan-1 space probe’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper Spectrometer to locate the water, perhaps formed after the collision between a planet and the primordial Earth that led to the Moon’s formation.